TechBump.info – Online Technology Blog

Following the announcement last week from Twitter that they can now block specific Tweets on a per-country basis, Google have now announced a similar move with Blogger that allows specific blogs to be blocked for individual countries, while keeping them online and active in the rest of the world. Google describes the move on their blog as happening because… “Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers.

The Add-on Compatibility Reporter add-on for the Firefox web browser was a useful browser extension to force add-on compatibility in unsupported versions of the Firefox web browser. While it was not able to force compatibility for add-ons that were incompatible due to changes in the browser itself, it managed to enforce compatibility for the majority of add-ons. Mozilla with Firefox 10 introduced the compatibility by default feature which enforces compatibility natively for the majority of add-ons. As a consequence, the compatibility enforcing capabilities have been removed from Add-on Compatibility Reporter.

I just read about Operation Black March on Reddit which suggests to boycott all media, and in particular film, music, books and magazine companies, in the whole month of March. The operation aims to be a counter-movement against the lobbying of media companies that try to censor the Internet and act openly against the freedom of speech. With SOPA, PIPA and ACTA only the beginning, it could get a lot worse before it gets better.

Halfway to living up to its moniker with over 250 startups, 500 Startups held a series of demo days this week and last, where a group of 33 scrappy startups presented their wares to investors in both New York and San Francisco. As we are wont to do with these things, we visited the 500 Startups offices in Mountain View and interviewed the seven that we thought were the most interesting, from both an investor and consumer standpoint. The startups chosen spanned all sorts of market territory, from a novel take on media-based eCommerce to an SaaS for farmers, but what they all had in common was a unique approach to the problem they were trying to solve as well as inkling of that other indeterminate thing that makes a startup great. Also, I’m pretty sure Switchcam , a startup that allows for a combining of different camera angles on video, should be on here.

Convergence. Remember that word from the dot com era?

If it’s a feature your customers are asking for, it’s difficult not to want to provide it. Although one of the benefits of public cloud computing is the ability to provision computing and storage resources from anywhere in the world on-demand, enterprises in Europe are wary that if their cloud-based assets are migrated to servers residing in the U.S., then they could (even if they never have yet) be subject to inspection by U.S. law enforcement authorities, even though the assets themselves are not American. It’s still the most controversial provision of the U.S.

AMD today laid out its plans for the next couple of years at its Financial Analyst Day. The plans are a mix of familiar and logical extensions of the company’s current products, but contained some more surprising elements: specifically, AMD opened the door to future processors that include ARM CPUs. The underlying themes to AMD’s plans are faster iteration—a GPU-like 18-24 months between CPU designs, compared to the current 3 or more years—achieved by moving away from custom designs and depending more heavily on synthesized chip layouts, and lower power usage. This in turn will give AMD more flexibility to integrate CPUs and GPUs—and potentially other co-processors too—into what the company calls APUs (accelerated processing units)